Jose Mourinho was relaxed in the Camp Nou press room. He had slowed down after kneeling on the grass when Mbappé scored Madrid's second goal in the classic, he had walked with a firm step towards Lunin to give him the first post-match hug and he no longer had any more adrenaline in his body. Madrid, his Madrid, had resurrected when few expected it, taking three vital points from Barça to make the fight for the championship longer. A resurrection that began to take shape after the defeat against Atlético at the Metropolitano.
After losing the Madrid derby, the white team has won five consecutive victories against Villarreal, Roma, Seville, Leipzig and Barça. The duel against the yellow submarine was the expulsion and subsequent four-match ban for Vinicius, and the one in Rome acted as a turning point: the team came back from a 3-1 deficit with Bernardo and Güler on the field and with Valverde at right back, convincing Mourinho and the locker room of the necessary solutions to the team's complicated situation.
For this reason, and although the environment was pessimistic about the result for the Camp Nou duel, the Madrid locker room was growing in optimism during the previous days. "Something has changed in recent weeks," explain sources close to the squad. At a press conference, Mourinho summarized this last month in his own way: "It's not that we have been a disaster or that we have not been a group. The group is very strong internally, there are zero problems and there is empathy. It is a group... I call it a beautiful group to work with. And the beautiful groups are united in the difficulty," explained the Portuguese, making a bit his own of what Ancelotti repeated so much: "It is the healthiest locker room I have ever had."
This squad has gone through difficult moments in recent months, with anger between the coaching staff and some players, changes of coach and internal fights, such as that between Tchouaméni and Valverde, but Mourinho, again in his own way, has managed to unite the group despite the differences that may exist between them. "The day after losing against Atlético, people arrived calm. And now the same. I'm not going to let people have their heads on the moon, because now if we lose at Sardinero against Racing this is of no use. Madrid does not play to win at the Camp Nou, it plays to win championships," Mourinho developed.
And in that resurrection, beyond the mentality of the coach or the squad, football and the piece changes that the Portuguese has made have a lot to do with it. Against Villarreal, in the first game after the national team break, he already left Vinicius on the bench and put Diomande on the left wing, with the luck that the Ivorian scored the winning goal. And in Rome, a few days later, Valverde finished the game on the side, with Güler and Bernardo on the pitch. The same trio that was part of the starting eleven of the classic.
The comeback in Rome taught many things to Mourinho, who against Sevilla, Leipzig and Barcelona has repeated with Valverde as a full-back and has always included Güler or Bernardo as starters, providing the midfield with more technique than usual. "In these weeks I have learned that in the center of the field having a combination of talents gives us more than having two players with similar characteristics. I think that the people at the top also like this mix, because it gives us balance to defend and more quality when it comes to going out," explained the coach, forceful when talking about the changes he has made in his puzzle.
